person with pride, he guessed, under all her sweetness—no girl to fling herself into the arms of the first stranger. And what had he to offer her more than another? He could not hope to sweep her off her feet; he must lay a certain amount of siege. He did not know whether he had been maladroit this afternoon, but he had been unfortunate. Yet he had approached the subject nearest his heart; she must surely have guessed. . . .
Dully through the fog, when he had got as far as Drumchastle, came the clop-clop of a horse’s hoofs, not behind him, but in front. He was, in fact, overtaking the horseman. As man and beast began to loom up before him, Ranald could tell that both must be tired; the horse was but a shaggy pony—poor little beast! The man jogging along on him had a weary back; a rolled plaid strapped behind him suggested that he was a traveller. And the odd thing was that both rider and garron had a familiar look; yet surely that must be a trick of the mist. A few strides more and Ranald stopped dead with an exclamation—and immediately afterwards set forward still more rapidly, calling out: “MacVeagh, MacVeagh, is it you?”
The rider, startled, pulled up; Ranald, alongside, found himself indeed looking into the little wizened visage of Murdoch MacVeagh, his brother’s factotum, sometimes dignified by the title of grieve.
“Indeed, Mr. Ranald, it is—at least, I’m thinking so, but I’m none too sure of it! Mo thruaigh, it might be that I was nothing but a piece of old board, so stiff as I am!”
Premonition of some disaster at Fasnapoll now swept surprise from Ranald’s heart. “In God’s name, what is it? You have come after me with ill news, I fear. My brother . . . the children . . . ?”
“Do not be troubling yourself now, Mr. Ranald,” replied the little monkey-like man consolingly. “They are all well and hearty. But there was a bit of a letter come for you from France——”
“Well, give it me, man!”
“Wait now, Mr. Ranald; I’ve more for you than that, and when you hear what it is you’ll maybe not open the letter . . . or maybe you’ll open it the quicker. But let’s be getting off the middle of the road!” Swearing under his breath, he creaked out of the saddle and pulled his shaggy mount to the side of the way, where the wooded slopes, shrouded and dripping, lifted above them. “Come closer now, Mr. Ranald, for there’s no knowing who may be passing in this haar.” And as Ranald, mystified, stooped his head the little man said in a penetrating whisper: “He’s come!”
“Who has come?”
“You can ask that?” exclaimed MacVeagh in shocked tones. “Why, he that’s waited for, to be sure—Phrionnsa òg Tearlach mac Sheumais! The French brig that brought him passed under Muick the very day you left—I mind marking a strange sail, but I was busy, and thought little of it at the time. And she put into Loch nan Uamh, and there he is, it seems, in the house of Angus MacDonald of Borradale!”
Ranald stared almost petrified at the bringer of such tidings out of the mist. There were beads of fog on the nap of his old hat, on his eyebrows. Then Struan was right! “Come! He has really come! . . . And what force has he brought with him?”
“Force, is it? Not a soldier, not a gun—just himself, blessings on him, and a few Scots gentlemen—or maybe Irish.”
The young man ran his hand through and through the pony’s tangled forelock. “This is likely some fantastic tale that’s got about,” he said after a moment. “Without men, without arms—it can’t be true!” Then some words came back to him, ringing through a little room on a night of storm: Though I go with but three followers . . . though I go alone! By God, then the Prince had done as he swore he would! It was fine, extraordinary fine and spirited, but—what next?
“Has the laird written to me on this matter, Murdoch?”
MacVeagh shook his grizzled head. “He would not. And I was first to tell you this news for your private ear alone, in the case that you should wish—you’ll be understanding, now?—to be off to France as though you had known nothing of it!”
Ranald tore at the patient garron’s hair. “But—how can I? If this news be true one at least of us must follow the Prince!”
“Ay, ’tis so,” agreed MacVeagh, wiping his face. “You will have talked about it with Fasnapoll; he said as much.”
“If my brother goes out, Murdoch, and the business comes to naught, as well it may, then——”
“Ay,” said old MacVeagh again. He was perfectly conversant with the situation; for him it was but a day since the Fifteen with its confiscations and attainders. “Ay. If it comes to naught, there’s the estate will be taken by the Government and the weans dispossessed, not to speak of himself in danger, maybe, of Tyburn.”
“But one of us must go! It must not be said that no Maclean of Askay fought for his Prince!”
“Forbye Maclean of Maclean will not be leading out the clan,” MacVeagh, himself of a Maclean sept, reminded him.
“Only because he is a prisoner in the Tower of London. ’Tis I will have to go out, MacVeagh; last year when I came back from France we settled that, the laird and I.” But in those days he had not had an inheritance waiting for him. . . . Well, the inheritance must wait a while longer. The young man of Dunkirk had come almost alone, almost in the fishing smack he had spoken of—for very shame another young man, a professed Jacobite, who only last night had drunk to his coming, could not slink out of Scotland just as he set foot on it, slink out to cultivate his vineyards and lie soft in a French bed when he might be belting on the claymore and lying with Prince Tearlach in the heather.
“You must start back to-morrow, Murdoch, and tell my brother I am going out. But come along now to Mount Alexander, and the Chief will give you a bed. I doubt, however, if this poor beast will carry you there.”
Murdoch fumbled in a pouch. “And here’s the French letter.”
Ranald broke the seal and glanced at the beginning and signature with preoccupied eyes. The letter was from M. Marcelin, his late uncle’s lawyer, requesting to know when he might expect him at Girolac. When indeed? He read no further, but thrust the letter into his pocket and went forward in the mist with MacVeagh, the pony and the news. What would Struan, that inveterate old Jacobite, say to what he had to tell?
Ranald found at Mount Alexander much excitement and a number of Robertsons, Malcolm among them. For the tidings had already reached “the earthly paradise” by another channel, and Struan, brewing with his own hands a vast bowl of punch, and surrounded by arrack, brandy and lemons, was declaiming the combined Nunc Dimittis and Te Deum of an enthusiast who for all his seventy-seven years and past outlawries did not intend to sit quietly at home merely to observe the progress of the Lord’s Anointed.
“Faith, we scarce know ourselves, from the Chief downwards,” exclaimed Malcolm Robertson, wringing Ranald’s hand. “(I heard you were here, Mr. Maclean, and have been looking to see you at Auchendrie.) If ’tis true, as they say, that Lord Tullibardine—Duke William—has come with the Prince, what a to-do there will shortly be at Blair!” And he laughed like a schoolboy at the prospect of mischief, his fair face quite flushed with excitement.
It was not until he was in his own bedchamber that night that Ranald had leisure to think coolly. It was late, and to mark the occasion he had been obliged to imbibe a certain quantity of claret as well as of punch—but he could put away a bottle and be none the worse of it. As he sat by the open window he was glad to exchange the heat and noise of festivity for the sound of the unseen Tummel pouring over its rock-pools between him and Schiehallion. The mist had completely vanished and the moon was coming up. What would this postponement of his taking possession of Girolac, his taking up, instead, arms for the Prince, what effect would this have upon his chances with Miss Stewart? Why, surely, it would increase them! She was, he had seen last year, heart and soul a Jacobite; she must approve his action. It was true that in the end he would still have to take her over the sea, because he had not the means of supporting a wife elsewhere . . . unless indeed with a Stuart once more upon the throne he could obtain suitable employment in Scotland. And it was true that if